Manufacturers of mechanical equipment, food packagers, and other users of wax and grease for lubricating, sealing, and other uses have a continuing need for wax and grease compositions. Manufacturing of these waxes and greases are usually expensive. This may be typically due to requirement of pricey petroleum feed in such manufacturing process.
Waxes and grease (or grease base-stocks), in general, are made from petroleum feed or gas-to-liquid processes. The price of petroleum feed stocks are increasing with time and thus there is a steady increase in prices of waxes- and greases. Recently, there have been several discoveries of gas (mostly methane) reservoirs and using Fischer-Tropsch process; these can be converted into higher chain length hydrocarbons to give gasoline, lubricating oils, grease base stocks, and waxes. The products produced this way are relatively more expensive and thus there is a need to utilize readily available polyethylene waste and recycle them to produce the same materials at considerably lower cost.
It would be advantageous to have a relatively inexpensive process for producing wax and grease base stock. Such a process would ideally utilize a readily available inexpensive feedstock and would use an inexpensive process. Waste plastics/polymers have been used in known processes for the manufacture of such products. Plastic waste is among the fastest growing solid waste and utilizing this solid waste to produce useful wax and grease addresses growing plastic disposal problems.
Further, majority of the polymer/plastics waste may be polyethylene and due to its non-biodegradability, it has been accumulating in nature. Polyethylene waste in general is either land-filled or burnt-former leads to the loss of material and waste of land while the latter results in emission of green-house-gases; only a small proportion of entire plastic waste is currently being recycled as secondary polymers which have poor quality and give low financial returns.
In recent times, there have been considerable efforts to convert these polymeric solid wastes into useful products such as fuels, lubricants, waxes and grease base stocks. Existing conversion processes may not be efficient enough and can release green-house gases into environment. Further, current techniques may be sensitive to quality and quantity of waste plastic feed and they can have an impact to the end product quality. This can be especially important as plastic waste can vary in its consistency due to the varying plastic grades.
The drawings described herein are for illustration purposes only and are not intended to limit the scope of the present disclosure in any way.